Forward Looking: Drinking from the Fire Hose
Published by cory April 7th, 2008 in Marketing Strategy, Rant, User Needs, NextWeb.Umair is “communitied out”, no small task for a guy that lives and breathes this stuff.
I’ve been stewing for a bit on recent deficiencies in the current web information fire hose which just slams down so much information so fast that my trip to a meeting today meant I missed out on “the dialog”. Not real sure I really needed to be tapped into it for any reason other than my inherent need for information (heard that on a TWIT podcast this morning).
As a marketer, I’m feeling that consumer voice screaming in my head with problems that aren’t being solved. There’s Twitter, blogs, RSS and the social network of choice, but it isn’t mine, on my terms, with my voice and on my server with me sending permissions to other people to share and interact with my media on some grander edgeconomy.
I can’t get at a Twitter stream on a good UI (or Facebook for that matter), can’t keep up with the few hundred blogs I want to track and I’d actually like to add more. All these content creators, good thoughtful folks, don’t all use Facebook, they aren’t all close “friends” deserving of being that close to me anyway, but maybe they will be someday. I’m not interested in narrowing my focus on just the A listers as there are so many more thought leaders putting it out there. I also have to slam together my business life with my personal one while maintaining my “voice”.
To top it off, it is 9 PM on Monday evening and Twitter is down. 
This is where the next web product development should begin.
Update: Google’s App Engine is interesting, but not when it comes to the rest of us.
Great image in the title. So far, different media produce communities with different etiquette/dynamics, due to things like ease of cross-linking, comments structure, etc. There *is* surplus of information, but it comes in forms people can assess intuitively, for the lack of better word. Just naming your contacts “friends” on LiveJournal and “followers” on Twitter creates different expectations and weights.